SES social media measurement round up

August 22nd, 2008 by Lloyd Gofton

This will be my last post for a while, as i’m off to get married and then away on honeymoon, so for my final entry as a single man I thought I would look into the noise coming out of SES San Jose this week, specifically focused on social media measurement…and there’s plenty of it.

As you may have seen, there are a whole host of informative posts on the measuring success in a web 2.0 world and social media and analysis sessions, which both took place earlier this week. My favourite posts can be found via the online marketing blog, which gives a step-by-step rundown of the sessions and valuable learnings.

Both sessions involved Marshall Sponder, senior web analyst for Monster.com. Marshall’s presentation can be seen here.

There are two things that I would like to pick up on specifically.

First a good point from the measuring success in a web 2.0 world session, where Marshall Sponder confirmed that as well as understanding that social media measurement is about conversations, we will only get to the next level of measurement if we treat visitors from Twitter for example, differently than visitors from forums, and then differently again from direct visitors. Without measuring the conversation, and the outcomes of that conversation, we are missing a huge chunk of useful data.

The online marketing blog listed the key takeaways from the social media and analysis session as:

1. There is no killer metric

2. Track anything possible to glean insight

3. Social media is not just about numbers

4. It’s all relative (focus on benchmarking and trends)

5. Measuring social media does not + ROI for social media

6. View monitoring social media as a Social Intelligence programme, involving the world’s biggest focus group

So the key learnings for me are there is no holy grail of measurement in terms of a catch all metric, and to get the most out of measurement data we need to re-evaluate the data sources and begin evaluating conversations from their point of origin.

Finally, I should point out that the panel for the social media session included Edmund Wong, VP Strategy iCrossing and that iCrossing is a client of ours in the UK. This post is in no way meant to promote our client, it’s simply a review of two very useful sessions, one of which happens to include iCrossing.

                              

Tags: conversations, metrics, SES San Jose, social media measurement

This entry was posted on Friday, August 22nd, 2008 at 11:28 am and is filed under Digital communications, Industry events, Social media, Trends and research, Useful resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.